The French are bemused and worried by the health care debate

Obama campaigning in Iowa, March 2007. Image by IowaPolitics.com.

Freelance journalist Michael Cosgrove observes how the U.S. health care debate is viewed from across the pond.

America’s health care debate is being closely followed in Europe, and nowhere more so than in France, where the press carries daily updates on the situation and spin-off issues such as the Heath Ledger poster.

Understanding their reaction means understanding a little about the French context. The majority of French people, around 65 percent according to various polls, have a negative view of America, and their ‘Anti-Américanisme’ is analysed by specialists as being a mixture of envy, frustration at France’s relative decline as a world power, and fear. 

France has a universal public health system which is funded by taxes. Everyone has access to it and private insurance is generally considered to be a complement to the health service and not a substitute. In other words, the complete antithesis of the American system as it stands.

All this may lead the reader to imagine that France is busy scoffing condescendingly at the debate and being openly scornful in a “See, what an ugly and violent place it is” kind of way.

Well, the reader would be wrong.

The French are in fact very concerned at what is happening, and they are beginning to fear that the whole thing may slip out of everyone’s control and lead to the return of attitudes not seen in the USA since the sixties. They consider the Ledger poster, Palin’s “death tribunals” and the comparing of Obama to Hitler to be more than excessive and they unanimously blame Republicans for whipping up hate.

The press generally concurs that a lot of the criticism aimed at Obama’s health care proposals are no more than the thinly-veiled racism of radical Republicans who cannot digest the fact that a black man is their President.

Here’s how the centrist daily Le Monde summed it all up:

"This debate has become completely irrational. Full of insane argumentation and infamous accusations which, up until recently, only came from ultraconservative groups which are often racist in nature. But now they are used in speeches by republican leaders (..)to the point where the real issues of the reform have been totally forgotten."

The American health care system itself is extremely negatively viewed in France, although French political analysts are not convinced by Obama’s proposals either.  

One paper summed them up by writing; “The vague nature of this project, and notably the financing aspect of it, has left the majority of America dubitative.”

The sentiment behind the analysis is more ominous though, and is shared by most French people, who are seriously worried about the future of American politics should this debate get out of hand.

The last word here goes to the very-slightly-left of centre ‘L’Express.’

“In just a few days the debate on reforming the health care system in the United States has degenerated seriously. Acts of intimidation and violence towards Democrat representatives have multiplied and the threats have spread to include Obama himself. If he fails (to get his reform voted in one from or another) Barack Obama risks becoming a lame duck President very early in his term......The mother of all political battles has begun in the United States, that which will determine if Obama has the capacity to carry out his ambitious programme of reforms. It will also determine if the American people really have turned the page of the conservative and ultraliberal era, or not.”

And a return to that era is what the French fear most.

Michael Cosgrove is a Lyon, France-based freelance journalist, business translator, and interpreter and teaches English to French businesspeople.